Return to Orchestra
30 May 2019I’ve always been one to get sentimental about the past.
My first experience with this was when I moved to Shanghai when I was 12 years old. It was my first time undergoing a significant change in lifestyle as I had up until that point been happily growing up in the same town as where I was born. Although I had visited Shanghai before, moving to the other side of the globe and being placed within the wildly diverse expat community was about as foreign as it got for me.
While this experience would ultimately end up becoming a considerable pillar in my formative years, I have vivid memories in the first few days of living in Shanghai, being awake from midnight until 5am, chatting with my friends back “home” on Google Buzz and Messenger. My choice to live near nocturnally was on one hand an effort to stay in the know with whatever happenings were going with my friends, but also a refusal to overcome jetlag and face my new reality.
It isn’t so much to say that I was in denial but rather that I was fiercly unwilling to let go. This kind of feeling would later prove to be a common theme in the years to come, even to this day. Graduating high school, changing friend groups, the start and end of first relationships, starting university, the teen years are filled with varying forces of change. Rejection of change and retainment of the present may be two sides of the same coin but they are not quite the same.
For me personally, one of the things that I struggled with the most when entering university was the loss of my music community back home (I had since moved back from Shanghai for high school). That particular network was one that brought me immense joy and fulfillment through the years and knowing that its time as a leading role in my life had concluded was something that like moving to Shanghai, I found tough to just oblige to.
Despite majoring in a fairly unrelated field (Computer Science), I decided to continue my music journey into university though it was distinctly different in flavour than what I was used to. I took private studio lessons (which had a much higher intensity than past instruction) four months of the year, performed only twice a year and played in a small chamber ensemble of 3-4 people. I’m incredibly happy for these opportunities and I can firmly look back and say that these experiences have been among the highlights of my university career.
And yet, though I was continuing my passion, I still could not help but shake my enchantment with the past. It was only until this past week that I was able to make sense of it all. For the first time, my school commitments cooperated with the university’s orchestra rehearsal schedule and I eagerly signed up, excited to get started.
Upon arriving to the first rehearsal, it dawned on me, this was breaking my 3 year hiatus from large ensemble playing - the longest interval I’ve ever gone since picking up a violin for the first time when I was 5. This rehearsal was a homecoming, a return to something that had once been integral to my life.
I remember during the rehearsal, my stand partner shifted over our music stand to her side since she was apparently having trouble seeing the notes but in doing so and pulling to stand too far, I was then unable to clearly read the page.
I couldn’t help but smile.
I had totally forgotten about this particular quirk of sharing a stand - the silent tug of war played between two players battling for a better view when the music is printed at an ant sized font. This brief interaction is something that most if not all instrumentalists have experienced at one point or another. However, in my lengthy absence from orchestra playing, I had forgotten about this awkwardly hilarious exchange that I have played out hundreds of times in the past.
Small details since forgotten about playing in orchestra resurfaced and I beamed at each one.
Although our past selves are bridged by continuous flows of change and development, personally, I have always tended to partition my life journey into disparate and distinct iterations of myself.
What I have come to learn from my experience returning to orchestra is that what makes each of our past selves unique is as much an impression of the particular lifestyle once led as it is about the personal morals/values/etc held at the time.
That is to say, it is often the case that the reason a particular past version of oneself feels so far away from the present is not as much a reflection of how much one has actually fundamentally changed as a human but rather how much the past and present lifestyles differ.
A short few months ago, the social role music played in my life before university felt so distant to me and I often wistfully reflected, “that part of my life is behind me”. And yet after just a few orchestra rehearsals, I am amazed how easily one can reintegrate and step back into a seemingly far-off disposition/state of being.
While it is certainly not always the case that one can find such a reconnection to themselves - sometimes people foundationally change - my experience with orchestra serves as an optimistic outlook that the seemingly lost past that we might occasionally romanticize over, is perhaps not as far away as it may seem.